How Banking and Payment Companies Use the Data Cloud for Customer 360
A whopping 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen, according to a McKinsey survey. Today’s consumers have become more demographically diverse and financially savvy, and they now expect faster and more personalized services, forcing banks to rethink how they use data and technology to provide a differentiated customer experience. However, many banks are hampered by siloed and duplicative technology architectures, different and competing content stores and data models, and differing levels of governance, authentication, and data access controls.
These conditions create challenges with data access, velocity, and entitlement. This results in an inconsistent customer experience due to siloed customer views across business lines, missed opportunities with delayed customer analytics, and compliance risk due to a lack of data governance and security controls for customer data.
To help companies combat fragmented data and gain a 360-degree view of the customer, the Snowflake Financial Services Cloud centralizes data from various sources and in various formats in one secure repository. Snowflake Marketplace enables data enrichment with data from third-party sources, including demographic, identity, macroeconomic, geospatial, and alternative data.
Snowflake’s data security and governance controls enable financial services organizations to protect, store, and access customer, account, and risk data. Apart from features such as Dynamic Data Masking and end-to-end encryption for data in transit and at rest, Snowflake also enables companies to create Global Data Clean Rooms. This functionality allows financial organizations such as banks to collaborate with external partners without exposing their underlying customer data.
From there, a bank using Global Data Clean Rooms can:
- Streamline their customer acquisition and onboarding processes
- Build customer-centric digital experiences
- Find new cross-sell and upsell opportunities with Next Best Action or product suitability insights
- Enable more personalized financial planning and portfolio construction
Here’s how a few of our financial services customers are using Snowflake to gain a comprehensive view of their own customers:
Western Union’s leaders turned to Snowflake to gain a more comprehensive view of its customers by consolidating data and eliminating resource contention. The company’s legacy architecture not only made developing visualizations, provisioning users, and ensuring 24x7 uptime operationally burdensome, but it also diverted resources from enabling more analytics.
Architecting on Snowflake provided a single source of truth that aligns with Western Union’s multi-cloud strategy and reduced the company’s data warehousing costs by more than 50%. This also enabled business leaders to better monitor their digital payment transaction volumes and build more actionable insights for their sales and marketing teams around their customers. With Snowflake, Western Union is able to ensure an ever-improving experience for more than 150 million customers across its retail and digital channels globally.
Swedish FinTech Northmill offers the personalized touch of traditional banking combined with the digital experience of a 100% cloud-based, 21st-century neobank. Northmill has made significant strides to connect its business and personal banking customers. By launching its own payment method and POS system, it aims to enhance personalized customer experiences through a seamless chain of transactional data. But offering this kind of service to hundreds of thousands of customers means collecting, processing, and analyzing huge volumes of data in a secure, ethical, yet agile way.
Northmill chose Snowflake’s Data Cloud to develop the products and services its customers need and extract value from data in ways that weren’t possible before. Using the data lake workload in Snowflake’s platform, Northmill now ingests all its customer and operational data—both structured and unstructured—into Snowflake in its original form. And with the integration capabilities in Snowflake’s platform helping provide a seamless flow of data between Northmill’s data lake and data warehouse instances—including Fivetran for ingestion and ThoughtSpot for BI—the bank always has access to clean data on demand. In the future, Northmill is planning to take seamless banking and commerce to the next level by offering an end-to-end payment and checkout experience for both shoppers and retailers.
First Tech Federal Credit Union
First Tech Federal Credit Union serves the world’s leading technology companies and their employees. More than 700,000 members rely on its personalized financial services and banking solutions. To enable a member-centric banking experience, First Tech ingests and analyzes large amounts of financial, operational, and customer data into the Snowflake Data Cloud. Ingesting all critical business data into Snowflake provides a single source of truth to power First Tech’s BI and advanced analytics workloads. Unified data in Snowflake supports many data analytics use cases, such as a holistic view of member interactions, better insights into cash flow forecasting, and prepayments analytics.
Now, analysis of member behavior can be done in one highly available location. Snowflake enables the creation of personalized Tableau dashboards and reports to feed data to frontline staff, helping them to deliver personalized phone, video, and in-person interactions. Lenders can rely on data from Snowflake to keep pace with demand for mortgage loans and track consumer lending performance against targets. Credit teams use Snowflake to understand and manage lending risks.
To discover how your organization can use Snowflake to leverage Customer 360:
- Learn more about the Snowflake Financial Services Data Cloud
- Read our Financial Services Success Guide: 8 Ways Financial Services Organizations Deliver Innovation and Security with the Data Cloud
- Read our blog post: Delivering Deeper Customer 360 Insights with the Data Cloud and ThoughtSpot
- Watch our webinar: Delivering Personalized Banking Experiences with Customer 360-Degree Views
- Read our industry brief: Snowflake’s Financial Services Data Cloud
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